Kevin Stilley

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January 6, 2017 by kevinstilley

Books & Reading – select quotes

read.001As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
~ Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
~ Joseph Addison

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Joseph Addison

Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author’s mind, without offense.
~ Amos Bronson Alcott, in Concord Days

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
~ Maya Angelou

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
~ Maya Angelou

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
~ W. H. Auden

Reading maketh a full man.
~ Francis Bacon

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
~ Francis Bacon

He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
~ Isaac Barrow

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (NY: Fawcett, 1994), page 6.

The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky

Reader, If it be not strong upon thy heart to practise what thou readest, to what end dost thou read? To increase thy own condemnation? If thy light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing man thou art, the more miserable man thou wilt be in the day of recompense; thy light and knowledge will more torment thee than all the devils in hell. Thy knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash thee, and that scorpion that will for ever bite thee, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw thee; therefore read, and labour to know, that thou mayest do, or else thou art undone for ever. When Demosthenes was asked, what was the first part of an orator, what the second, what the third? he answered, Action; the same may I say. If any should ask me, what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian? I must answer, Action; as that man that reads that he may know, and that labours to know that he may do, will have two heavens — a heaven of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and a heaven of glory and happiness after death.
~ Thomas Brooks, in Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks, Banner of Truth, 1652 p. 22

Books we must have though we lack bread.
~ Alice Brotherton

A good book is never exhausted. It oges on whispering to you from the wall.
~ Anatole Broyard

Laws die; books never.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
~ Anthony Burgess

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
~ Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
~ Italo Calvino

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
~ Henry Seidel Canby

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
~ Angela Carter

He gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances that a-nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus he sleeping little and reading much the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that degree that at last he lost the use of his reason.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in Don Quixote

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
~ William E. Channing

“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquanintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
~ Winston Churchill

Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.
~ Cicero

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Cicero

The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
~ Tom Clancy

A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
~ Henry T. Coutts

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
~ Hart Crane

Literature is man’s exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
~ David Daiches

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
~ Rene Descartes

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
~ Charles Dickens

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of Prancing Poetry.

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
~ Emily Dickinson

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
~ Michael Dirda

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
~ W. E. B. Du Bois

I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
~ Marguerite Duras

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
~ Albert Einstein

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, the most patient teachers.
~ Charles Eliot

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience”

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Scholar

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. My luggage is my library. My home is where my books are.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
~ Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
~ Clifton Fadiman

If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the Empire were laid at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
~ Francois Fenelon

But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!
~ Eugene Field in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
~ Gustave Flaubert

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
~ Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary

Read in order to Live.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
~ Anatole France

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
~ Anatole France

ReadingToday a reader, tomorrow a leader.
~ Margaret Fuller

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
~ Neil Gaiman

Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
~ Bill Gates

The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
~ William Gladstone

I have always suspected that authors lie about the books they read, their purported influences, much as men lie about their sex lives; they are at once ashamed and vain, reluctant to be judged, hiding behind a safe parapet like Joyce and Proust and Kafka.
~ Brian Glanville

The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula Le Guin

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
~ Mark Haddon

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it ives you moral knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick

What is a book? Part matter and part spirit; par thing and part thought–however you look at it, if defies definition.
~ Ernest O. Hauser

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
~ Heinrich Heine

All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.
~ Ernest Hemingway

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
~ Gilbert Highet

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
~ S.I. Hiyakawa

Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
~ Horace as quoted by Montaigne

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not escape from my own life and problems. It is escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me.
~ Gladys Hunt, in Honey for a Woman’s Heart (HT: Heidi)

Every man who knows how to read has it in him power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
~ Aldous Huxley

Farther than arrows, higher than wings fly poet’s song and prophet’s words.
~ Inscription on the Brooklyn Public Library

Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.
~ Inscription in the Detroit Public Library

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ Inscription in the New York Public Library.

Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library

People who don’t read are brutes.
~ Eugene Ionesco

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I cannot live without books.
~ Thomas Jefferson

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ Joseph Joubert

A reader finds little in a book save what he puts here. But in a great book he finds space to put many things.
~ Joseph Joubert

A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
~ Franz Kafka

A book is a gift you can open again and again.
~ Garrison Keillor

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I’ve gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
~Garrison Keillor

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~ Helen Keller

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.
~ John F. Kennedy

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”–the norms of human action.
~ Russell Kirk, in Enemies of the Permanent Things. LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984. page 41

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
~ Charles Lamb

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
~ Charles Lamb

What is reading, but silent conversation.
~ Charles Lamb

Magazines all too frequently lead to books, and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
~ Fran Lebowitz

I have give up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
~ Oscar Levant

Any kid who has parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
~ Sam Levenson

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~ C. S. Lewis

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, read and reviewed by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell

My alma mater was books, a good library…I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
~ Malcolm X

The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme

bookaddiction.001A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
~ George R. R. Martin

I am a machine condemned to devour books.
~ Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, April 11, 1868

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
~ François Mauriac

Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton

What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”

There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley, in The Haunted Bookshop

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
~ Napoleon

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
~ Pablo Neruda

We read to know that we are not alone.
~ William Nicholson

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris

Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
~ William Lyon Phelps

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb

The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
~ Chinese proverb

No worse thief than a bad book.
~ Italian proverb

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 6.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 70.

Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
~ Will Rogers

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
~ Will Rogers

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin

The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
~ Carl Sandburg, from his poem “For You”, in Harvest Poems: 1910-1960

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.
~ Mary Schmich

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), page 89.

There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.
~ Maurice Sendak

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca

It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
~ B. F. Skinner

No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
~ Lemony Snicket

Reading makes the full man, and it is the full man who alone can overflow for the profit of others.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries, 24; quoted in Nettles, Living by Revealed Truth, 158

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele

Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.
~ R. L. Stein

I guess there are never enough books.
~ John Steinbeck

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron

My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson

Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau, in Reading

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
~ Atwood H. Townsend

Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.

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Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
~ Mark Twain

‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
~ Mark Twain

If you’re going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it’s well furnished.
~ Peter Ustinov

I was reading a book…’the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down.
~ Tim Vine

You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
~ Stephen Vizinczey

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from out neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
~ Voltaire

Books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language; the others do not matter.
~ Voltaire

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
~ Voltaire

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
~ Voltaire

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
~ Bernard de Voto

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
~ Simone Weil

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E.P. Whipple

As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White

Comerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.
~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
~ Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
~ Oscar Wilde

A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure–the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.
~ Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ John Wooden

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
~ Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting”

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
~ Virginia Woolf

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
~ Henny Youngman

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar

You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.
~ Zig Ziglar

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Front Page, Quotes Tagged With: Blog, Books, literature, poetry, proverbs, Quotes, Reading, scholarship, Writing

October 4, 2013 by kevinstilley

Bring the Books! [Charles Spurgeon]

“Paul had a few books which were left, perhaps wrapped up in the cloak, and Timothy was to be careful to bring them. Even an apostle must read. Some of our very ultra Calvinistic brethren think that a minister who reads books and studies his sermon must be a very deplorable specimen of a preacher. A man who comes up into the pulpit, professes to take his text on the spot, and talks any quantity of nonsense, is the idol of many. If he will speak without premeditation, or pretend to do so, and never produce what they call a dish of dead men’s brains—oh! that is the preacher. How rebuked are they by the apostle! He is inspired, and yet he wants books! He has been preaching at least for thirty years, and yet he wants books! He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books! He had had a wider experience than most men, and yet he wants books! He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things which it was unlawful for a men to utter, yet he wants books! He had written the major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books! The apostle says to Timothy and so he says to every preacher, “Give thyself unto reading.” The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all our people. You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible. We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master’s service. Paul cries, “Bring the books”—join in the cry.”

– – From “Paul — His Cloak and His Books”, a sermon preached by Rev. C.H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, November 29, 1863.

Filed Under: Bible Exposition, Blog, Books, Ethics / Praxis, History, Preaching / Teaching, Quotes Tagged With: Books, Preachers, Preaching, Reading, Spurgeon

June 20, 2013 by kevinstilley

Tuck Everlasting

Book Cover

(click on image for more book information)

One of the advantages of being a parent is that you get a second chance to become acquainted with great children’s books that you somehow missed during your own childhood. And, when you have six kids you not only get a second chance, but a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a ….

Tuck Everlasting, written by Natalie Babbit, is one of those books for me.

My daughter was reading Tuck Everlasting and left it laying on the living room coffee table. I picked it up to do the parently thing (yes, I know “parently” isn’t a word, but it should be) and review the book’s content. I couldn’t put it down until I had read it all. It is rare that one finds such beautiful descriptive prose in a book intended for children. The author’s wonderful use of language combined with mystery and a little magic make Tuck Everlasting and enchanting read.

A family secret, a precocious child, a mysterious traveling stranger, a kidnapping, a prison break, a wedding proposal and a challenging question about mortality and immortality — mix together with beautiful language and you’ve got Tuck Everlasting.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Family Circus Tagged With: Book Recommendations, children's books, literature, Reading

May 30, 2013 by kevinstilley

My Reading Life: Quotations

Book CoverThe following are a few of my favorite quotes from Pat Conroy’s book My Reading Life (2010). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
_ _ _

Since she did not attend college, she looked to librarians as her magic carpet into a serious intellectual life. Books contained powerful amulets that could lead to paths of certain wisdom. Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human. (p. 5).

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers. From the beginning I’ve searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.  (pp. 10-11).

Gone with the Wind is a war novel, a historical romance, a comedy of manners, a bitter lamentation, a cry of the heart, and a long, coldhearted look at the character of this lovely, Machiavellian Southern woman. It is beautifully constructed into fine, swiftly moving parts and sixty-three chapters. Margaret Mitchell possessed a playwright’s ear for dialogue and the reader never becomes confused as the hundreds of characters move in and out of scenes throughout the book. She grants each character the clear imprimatur of a unique and completely distinct voice. Once Miss Mitchell has limned the outlines of the main characters, they live eternally in the imagination of the reader. She was born to be a novelist, but then withdrew, having given voice to the one novel bursting along the seams of consciousness. Margaret Mitchell sings her own song of a land-proud, war-damaged South, and her voice is operatic, biblical, epic. Her genius lay in her choice of locale and point of focus and heroine. She leaves the great battlefields of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Bull Run and Antietam to the others and places the Civil War in the middle of Scarlett O’Hara’s living room. She has the Northern cannons sounding beyond Peachtree Creek as Melanie Wilkes goes into labor, and has the city of Atlanta in flames as Scarlett is seized with an overpowering urge to return home that finds her moving down Peachtree Street with the world she grew up in turning to ash around her.  (pp. 19-20).

This book [Gone With the Wind] demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.  (p. 32).

Good writing is one of the forms that hard labor takes. It is neither roadhouse nor weigh station, but much more like some unnameable station of the cross. It is taking the nothingness of air and turning it into a pleasure palace built on a foundation of words.  (p. 88).

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.  (p. 111)

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination.  (p. 154)

“Hurt is a great teacher. Maybe the greatest of all.” quoting Norman Berg  (p. 160)

The great books are like the elevation of the host to me, their presence transformed, their effect indelible and everlasting.  (p. 161)

Later, he [Norman Berg] claimed he loathed parties because it represented time stolen from his priestlike engagement with the great literature of the world.  (p. 162)

I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the companionship of writers. I try never to be rude, just seldom available. Though I have met some of the great writers of our time, I’ve become good friends with very few of them. The tribe is contentious, the breed dangerous.  (p. 173)

She [Alice Walker] was as friendly as a cow turd on an altar step.  (p. 180)

Because of the military life, I’m a stranger everywhere and a stranger nowhere. I can engage anyone in a conversation, become well liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance I can never recover, a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging, and an eye on the nearest door. The word “good-bye” will always be a killing thing to me, but so is the word “hello.” I’m pathetic in my attempts to make friends with everyone I meet, from cabdrivers to bellhops to store clerks. When I was a child, my heart used to sink at every new move or new set of orders. By necessity, I became an expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth, I was grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness, I saw my chance for rescue and I always leaped at it. When Mary Edwards Wertsch writes of military brats offering emotional blank checks to everyone in the world, she’s writing the first line in my biography.  Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that’s always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection’s done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling to the marine and his family again.  (pp. 191-192)

When I was a freshman in college, she [Ann Head] sent me a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast for my birthday and inscribed it, “One day I hope to read what you think about Paris. This is the best book I’ve ever read about the romance of writing.”  (p. 203)

Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers.  (p. 208)

Parisians also relish the xenophobic sport of stereotyping and love to offer an infinite variety of theories on the nature of Americans. To them, we as a people are shallow, criminally naïve, reactionary, decadent, over-the-hill, uncultured, uneducable, and friendly to a fault. To Parisians, all Americans are Texans, grinning cowboys.  (p. 208)

France is the only country in the world where friendliness is one of the seven deadly sins.  (p. 208)

And it would embarrass me that they unfailingly knew I was an American; I wore my nationality like a cheap cologne.  (p. 213)

Let me now add my own voice to the hallelujah chorus of novelists who have found themselves enraptured by the immensity and luminosity of War and Peace and cast my own vote that it is the finest novel ever written.  (p. 268)

I think that War and Peace is the best book about war ever written, and that includes The Iliad. It is also the best book about peace ever written.
(pp. 280-281)

To me, his [James Dickey] book Poems 1957–1967 is the finest book of poetry ever published in America, and I include in that assessment Leaves of Grass, the collected works of Emily Dickinson, the works of Wallace Stevens, and I will throw in T. S. Eliot for dessert. When Dickey is writing at his best, it is like listening to God singing in cantos and fragments about the hard dreaming required for the creation of the world. Dickey crafts and fixes each of his sentences as though he were trying to shape a mountain range glorious enough to hover over Asia. When I read James Dickey, I am transported into that ecstatic country where poetry and poetry alone can take you and shake you with the cutting beauty and hammerlock of its language.  (p. 299)

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever, from that day forward, is part of literature’s profligate generosity.  (p. 311)

Reading and prayer are both acts of worship to me.  (p. 320)

Reading great books gave me unlimited access to people I never would have met, cities I couldn’t visit, mountain ranges I would never lay eyes on, or rivers I would never swim. Through books I fought bravely in wars of both attrition and conquest. Before I’d ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago’s Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary—I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books.  (p. 321)

Here is all I ask of a book—give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.  (p. 327).

“Kintsugi” is “the Japanese practice of repairing ceramics with gold-laced lacquer to illuminate the breakage.”  (p. 330)

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Authors, Books, literary, Pat Conroy, Publishing, quotations, Quotes, Reading

January 7, 2013 by kevinstilley

What do you read?

How do you select what books you will read? To avoid wasting his time on bad books, Ralph Waldo Emerson used three criteria when selecting.

  1. Never read  a book that is not at least a year old.
  2. Never read a book that is not famous; and
  3. Never read anything but what you like.

What do you think of his criteria?

What would be on your list?

__________

No worse thief than a bad book.
~ Italian proverb

__________

Related Content

  • Books & Reading
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson – select quotes

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Books, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reading

August 30, 2011 by kevinstilley

A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning – Discussion Questions:

Class #2 – Early Western Civilization Seminar

Assigned Reading: A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall

Discussion Questions:

  • What do you enjoy reading?  What do you read?  Does it make a difference? “Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.”( ~ Seneca)  What kind of books does Schall refer to in his book.
  • Schall refers to Plato’s productions as “literary works” and Aristotle’s as “more pedestrian classnotes and lectures.”  (page 1)  What is the contrast that he is identifying with these referents?
  • In several places in the book Schall claims that a denial of truth is prominent in the current Zeitgeist.  Do you think this is a problem?  Is this related to common thought regarding “toleration?”  “… sin?”  “… judging?”  “… inability to speak on a particular subject unless you have been through that experience yourself?” Are those who deny “truth” in the spiritual realm consistent when it comes to the manner in which they live in the physical world?
  • Do you agree that reading the classics is essential to restoring a vital intellectual life that is open to truth?  What is truth?  Do you think that the average person would agree with Plato’s definition of truth?  (page 10)
  • Schall refers to an endemic of biblical illiteracy?  (page 12) Do you think it is as bad as he suggests?  Is our generation different from previous generations when it comes to knowing what the Bible says?
  • Does Schall expect most students to get a good college education?  Why, or why not?  How would you respond to his question found in the last sentence on page 13?
  • What do you think about Bloom’s suggestion that music may be the real educator of our youth?  (page 17)
  • In “Reading”, Henry David Thoreau writes, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!” Consider Schall’s account of the transformation of Augustine after reading the Hortensius.  Can you point to such an occurrence in your life? If not, why not? (page 18)
  • What do you think of Chesterton’s definition of humility, found on page 24?
  • When we discover contradictions and error in the “great books” should we resort to apathy, skepticism, or relativism? (page 24)
  • Schall claims that self-denial/self-discipline is primary and essential to education. Do you agree?  Just how important is it?  Re-read the last paragraph of page 25/first paragraph of page 26.  What role do you think self-discipline will play in how well you do at Southwestern?  “When a man is busy at study, the Evil Impulse whispers to him: Why tarryest thou here.  Go and join the men who flirt with pretty women.” – Talmud, Zohar, ii, 265b
  • Do you agree with the author about the relationship between self-discipline and freedom?  Schall says that self-discipline will set you free; Jesus said that the truth will set you free.  Which is it?  (page 29)  He also says that reading is freeing (page 43), can he not make up his mind?
  • Schall notes that “we don’t have to read everything.”  (page 31)  In fact, it would be impossible to do so.  So what should you read?  “Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.” (~ A. R. Orage)
  • Schall refers to the reading of Shakespeare; (page 32) do you think it is taking a shortcut to watch Shakespeare’s plays rather than reading them?  (for additional thought: http://kevinstilley.com/ode-to-shakespeare-in-modern-english-editions/)
  • Regarding the roles of student- teacher Schall writes, “This is what I have tried to do for students in insisting that they come to class regularly, after having carefully read the text.  The student who does not do this work himself is unteachable.  No teacher can really help him.”  (page 39)  Do you agree?
  • Schall defines a personal library as books that we have read again.  (page 34) What is the value of re-reading? “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.” ~ Clifton Fadiman.   Is there a similarity between anthropological field work and reading a great book?
  • Consider Schall’s comments about those to whom a student “owes” something for their education.  Who do you owe?  (page 36ff)
  • What is the value of reading a book in community rather than in isolation?  (page 42ff)  Watch the video clip from Apartment for Peggy; http://kevinstilley.com/the-benefits-of-colloquium/
  • Schall reminds us that, as Aristotle pointed out, “that many people who do not know books are nevertheless very wise.” (pages 43-44) Does this take away from his previous argumentation regarding the value of books?  Does this warn against letting your learning make you arrogant?

Questions For The Final Exam from this material:

  • Probably None

Recommended Additional Reading:

  • http://kevinstilley.com/books-reading-select-quotes/
  • “On the Reading of Old Books” by C.S. Lewis
  • The Best Things in Life, by Peter Kreeft
  • A Student’s Guide to The Core Curriculum, by Mark C. Henrie
  • From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, by Louis Markos
  • When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought, by John Mark Reynolds

Filed Under: Blog, Books, History, Philosophy, Worldview, Zeitgeist Tagged With: college, Education, Reading

January 11, 2011 by kevinstilley

Reading List For Life & Thought Seminars

First Year: Fall Semester
Early Western Civilization Seminar (IDE 1103)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Aristotle Selected Works, 3rd.

(Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, Categories, Rhetoric)

9780911589139

 

0911589139

 

 
Cicero On Duties 9780521348355 0521348358
Homer Odyssey 9780140449112 0140449116
Plato Republic

Timaeus and Critias

9780872201361

9780140442618

0872201368

0140442618

Sophocles (Greek Tragedies) Oedipus Rex

Antigone

9780226307909 0226307905

 

First Year: Spring Semester
Church & Empires Seminar (IDE 1203)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Athanasius On The Incarnation 9780913836408 0913836400
Augustine Confessions 9780800787240 0800787242
Aquinas On Faith and Reason

On Being and Essence

9780872204560

9780888442505

0872204561

0888442505

Anselm Proslogion 9780872205659 0872205657
Boethius Consolation of Philosophy 9780023464508 002346450X
Virgil The Aeneid 9780199231959 0199231958
Trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland Beowulf 9780192723697 0192723693
Trans. Keith Harrison Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 9780199540167 0199540167

 

Second Year: Fall Semester
World Religions Seminar (IDE 2103)

Religion Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Buddhism The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha 9780451627117 0451627113
Confucianism The Analects of Confucius 9780679722960 0679722963
Hinduism The Bhagavad-Gita 9780915132355 0915132354
Islam The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an 9780915957323 0915957329
Judaism The Talmud (Everyman’s Talmud) 9780805210323 0805210326
***Some leeway has been given to choose other texts in the realm of world religions. You may choose from Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Shinto, Taoism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Baha’i.

 

Second Year: Spring Semester
Renaissance and Reformation Seminar (IDE 2203)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy 9780199535644 0199535647
Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion 9780801025242 0801025249
Luther 95 Theses

The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

The Freedom of a Christian

 

9780800616397

 

0800616391

Erasmus Praise of Folly 9780140446081 0140446087
Molina On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia 9780801489358 0801489350
More Utopia 9780140449105 0140449108
Machiavelli The Prince 9780199535699 0199535698
Jacob, Margaret C. The Scientific Revolution: A Brief History with Documents 9780312653491 0312653492
Shakespeare Hamlet

Julius Caesar

9780140714548

9780199536122

0140714545

0199536120

***Recommended strongly that C.S. Lewis’ work Discarded Image, 6th Edition, be used as an introduction to this seminar.

 

Third Year: Fall Semester
Enlightenment Seminar (IDE 3103)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress 9780883680964 0883680963
Descartes, Rene Discourse on Method 9780140446999 0140446990
Locke, John Two Treatises on Gov’t 9780915144860 0915144867
Pascal, Blaise Pensees (Christianity for Modern Pagans) 9780898704525 0898704529
Rousseau, Jean Emile 9781591021117 1591021111
Wesley, John Selected Works 9780195028102 0195028104
***Recommend reading Jonathan Edwards’ Religions Affections corresponding history course.

 

Third Year: Spring Semester
The 19th Century Seminar (IDE 3203)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Darwin, Charles Origin of the Species 9781412018258 1412018250
Finney, Charles Lectures on Revivals of Religion 9781932370478 1932370471
Marx, Karl The Communist Manifesto 9781599869957 1599869950
Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond Good and Evil 9780486298689 048629868X
Spurgeon Lectures to My Students (selected) 9780310329114 0310329116
Tocqueville Democracy in America,

Vol 2

9780872204942 0872204944
***Recommend reading the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and other important political treatises in the corresponding history course.

 

Fourth Year: Fall Semester
The Early 20th Century Seminar (IDE 4103)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy 9780970377210 0970377215
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 9780393926361 0393926362
Dewey, John Experience and Education 9780684838281 0684838281
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land 9780393974997 0393974995
Freud, Sigmund Civilization and its Discontents (1989 ed.) 9780393301588 0393301583
James, William Pragmatism 9780915145058 0915145057
Russell, Bertand Why I am Not a Christian 9780671203238 0671203231
***Recommend reading Churchhill’s Second World War in corresponding history course

Fourth Year: Spring Semester
The Late 20th Century Seminar (IDE 4203)

Author Textbook ISBN-13 ISBN-10
Barth, Karl The Word of God and Theology 9780567082275 056708227X
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity 9780060652920 0060652926
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World 9780060776091 0060776099
Niebuhr, H. Richard Christ and Culture 9780061300035 0061300039
Vatican Vatican II Texts (selected) 9780918344373 0918344379
Derrida Deconstruction in a Nutshell 9780823217557 0823217558
***Recommend reading Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft in the corresponding history course.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Books, History, Philosophy Tagged With: classics, Reading, seminars, western civilization

December 19, 2010 by kevinstilley

Reading Your Textbooks

Advice to my students in regard to reading your textbooks:

In the days in which we live, the zeitgeist promotes the idea that more is better.  This philosophy of life has somehow extended itself into the area of religious education.  I am not suggesting that you should not read broadly, you should.  However, I believe that you will be better served by reading deeply.  In Sven Burkitt’s book, The Gutenberg Ellegies, he distinguishes these approaches as intensive reading versus extensive reading.

I have tried to find textbooks for you that are enjoyable to read, comprehensive in nature, and either consistent with a Christian worldview or culturally significant.  I encourage you to challenge yourself by going beyond the assigned readings and exposing yourself to other authors and ideas.  However, if the choice is between intensive reading of the class texts or the books on the class bibliography, I hope you will choose to read the class texts, then re-read them, and then read them again.

We can discuss this more in class, but for now I share with you an excerpt from the Preface of Andrew Murray’s book, The New Life;

“Let every portion be read over at least three times. The great bane of all our converse with Divine things is superficiality. When we read anything and understand it somewhat, we think that this is enough. No: we must give time, that it may make an impression and wield its own influence upon us. Read every portion the first time with consideration, to understand the good that is in it, and then see if you receive benefit from the thoughts that are there expressed. Read it the second time to see if it is really in accordance with God’s word: take some, if not all, of the texts that are adduced on each point, and ponder them in order to come under the full force of what God has said on the point. Let your God, through His word, teach you what you must think and believe concerning Him and His will. Read it then the third time to find out the corresponding places, not in the Bible, but in your own life, in order to know if your life has been in harmony with the New Life, and to direct your life for the future entirely according to God’s word. I am fully persuaded that the time and pains spent on such converse with the word of God under the teaching of this or some book that helps you in dealing with it, will be rewarded tenfold.”

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Reading, Reading Assignments, Reading Lists, textbooks

September 22, 2008 by kevinstilley

A Warning For My Students

When I was doing corporate training it was common for us to keep a bag of candy close by to throw at trainees from time to time.

“Good answer.  Have a Hershey’s Kiss.”  Toss, catch, unwrap, eat.  It broke any monotony and kept trainees on their toes.

I have been thinking about how I can implement a similar training/educational scenario for the students in the college classes I teach.  My classes can at times be rather large so I think I am going to have to modify my approach. Rather than a sack of candy, I think I am going to invest in a paintball gun.

“Smith, John Q., what did Aristotle have to say about Plato’s metaphysical dualism?”

The room grows silent as student Smith, John Q. considers his response. His pause extends a little too long. It is apparent that he has not read pages 66-87 of A.H. Armstrong’s An Introduction To Ancient Philosophy. So, I deftly reach into my briefcase, pull my new 08 Spyder MR2 to my shoulder, and squeeze the trigger.

Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! Three paintballs slap into the chest of student Smith, John Q. The monotony is broken, and there is plenty of incentive for students to do their assigned reading prior to the next class session.

Pedagogy at its best!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: assignments, Blog, classroom, Education, paintball, pedagogy, Reading, training, western civilization

July 11, 2008 by kevinstilley

Writing Rooms

Reading and WritingDo you need a particular environment to be able to write.  Personally, I have the same simple need for both reading and writing.  I need a quiet space free from distractions (i.e., no people).

The Guardian has posted pictures of the Writing Rooms of some authors.  The picture above is that of  Eric Hobsbawm.  Go on over to The Guardian to check out the rest.  You will need to click on the authors’ names to reveal the picture of their writing rooms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: author, creating, Creative, Reading, World News, Writing

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